Calls for Papers

Posted on September 6, 2017

TRANSFORMATIONS: LEADING CHANGE
MARCH 1-3, 2018 | CLEMSON, SC

The program in Women’s Leadership at Clemson University is pleased to host the 2018 SEWSA Annual Conference. The theme for the conference is “Transformations: Leading Change” as we hope to capture a unique moment in our history marked by a resurgence of activism and the need for new theoretical and practical transformations of our cultural, political, and economic landscape.

Events like the 2017 Women’s March on Washington and the Day Without an Immigrant signify the potential for transformation in our current political climate. As we gather in Clemson, we hope to reflect critically on the opportunities of this moment and draw insight and inspiration from past transformations of communities and institutions. Where do we see space for progressive leadership, and how might our notions of feminist leadership need to change? How do we more fully realize intersectionality and radical inclusiveness? How do we reconcile our ideals with practical and institutional constraints?

Proposals may consider a wide range of theories and practices of transformation. All disciplines, methodologies, and styles of presentation are welcomed, and from scholars at all levels. Possible presentation topics might include (but are not limited to):

Proposal submission deadline will be November 1, 2017. Proposal submission information will be available on the conference website and announced when open.Individual calls for papers for consideration for the People of Color Caucus, the LGBTQ Caucus, and the Student Caucus will be forthcoming and available on the conference website (currently under construction).

The Augusta University Women’s and Gender Studies Program invites you to register for our 2017 biennial WGST Symposium entitled “Year of the Woman? Gender and Power in Action.” Students, professors, and researchers from around the southeastern United States will be presenting all day long from 8am to 5pm on the Augusta University Summerville campus Saturday, March 18th.

Registration is free for Augusta University students not ordering lunch.

Posted on January 10, 2017:

WISCON ACADEMIC CALL FOR PAPERS: DEADLINE FEBRUARY 23

Lauren J. Lacey & Alexis Lothian, Academic Chairs for WisCon 41

We invite you to submit papers, panels, and presentations for Academic Programming at WisCon 41! Join us for a weekend dedicated to imagining, exploring, and critiquing alternate worlds, technological transformations, and the possibilities and processes for creating the feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-fascist futures we so badly need.

WisCon has a track of academic programming that is open to undergraduate, postgraduate, and independent scholars. One of the benefits of this track is that it strengthens the links between the wider feminist science fiction community and students and other scholars working on feminist science fiction and fantasy and related fields. The track operates very much like a conventional academic conference, with presentations based on individual or collaborative research. However, scholarly work on all aspects of feminist science fiction reaches an audience at WisCon that gives a kind of passionate and informed feedback that is rare at academic conferences.

We invite proposals from anyone with a scholarly interest in the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability with science fiction — broadly defined — in literature, media, culture, and politics. We particularly welcome scholarship on the work of our Guests of Honor, Kelly Sue DeConnick and Amal El-Mohtar, and on the histories and cultures of feminist and social-justice-oriented fan communities. We encourage submissions from scholars in all fields, including interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary areas, and from amateur and independent scholars as well as graduate students, postdocs, and faculty.

1992 was dubbed the “Year of the Woman” in newspaper headlines across the United States. A then –record number of women (four) served in the Senate, only a year after Anita Hill’s allegations forced the realities of sexual harassment into the national media spotlight. 25 years on, what has changed in the realm of gender and power? In 2017, what is the state of women’s leadership in our workplaces, our communities, our personal relationships, our activism, and our politics? Which women have gained ground, and who is being left behind? What new questions about gender, sexuality, and power do we face today that were not even imagined a quarter century ago?

Join us for this exciting conversation at the 5th Biennial Augusta University Women’s and Gender Studies Symposium, which will take place on Saturday, March 18, 2017. We invite proposals for papers, workshops, and panels that interrogate issues relating to gender and power from a variety of disciplinary and community activist approaches. This symposium makes space for presenters from diverse fields of experience; community members, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and social justice advocates are invited to propose papers or sessions.

Solicited topics include:

Women and leadership in the health sciences or elsewhere

Gender issues and the 2016 election

#YesAllWomen and other hashtag social/political movements

Trans issues in healthcare

Gender and nursing in historical or contemporary contexts

Gendered and/or sexualized harassment in the past or present, including spaces where harassment occurs that did not exist in 1992 (social media, other online spaces)

“Bathroom Bills” and other queer issues in recent American politics

The effects of political pressure on the delivery of women’s healthcare

Health at Every Size (HAES) and the politics of anti-obesity initiatives

Call out culture

Parental leave as a political issue

Fourth wave feminisms

Intersectional identities in politics, American or otherwise

The role of African-American women in the 2016 election

Gender in sports 45 years after Title IX

Gender and the embodiment of power in fiction, media, or popular culture

Racial privilege and the SlutWalk movement

Efforts to enact an Equal Rights Amendment, past and present

The second shift and its effects on women’s advancement and promotion, in healthcare or in any field of employment

Varieties of feminism and feminist action, past and present

Papers on other topics more broadly related to women’s and gender studies are also welcome, especially from undergraduates.

In addition to scholarly papers, the symposium seeks the performance, screening, or presentation of creative work related to the theme. Panels and workshops are also welcome. Because of Augusta University’s strong connections to the health sciences, proposals related to that area are particularly welcome.

Proposals are due Friday, January 6th 2017 and should include a one-page abstract that describes the main idea of the paper, workshop, or panel; names and affiliations of all participants; and information detailing multimedia or setup needs. Submit proposals to wmst@augusta.edu. Conference details will be posted here on our website.

The Augusta University Women’s and Gender Studies Program was established in 1998; in addition to a thriving interdisciplinary minor, the program participates in a myriad of co-curricular programming efforts on campus and in the community. Augusta University, home of the Medical College of Georgia, is one of only four public comprehensive research institutions in the state of Georgia. Founded in 1828, the university includes nine colleges and schools with nearly 9,000 students, over 1,600 faculty and nearly 14,000 employees across the university and related enterprises.

For this special issue of Gramma/Γράμμα: Journal of Theory and Criticism (2018) we invite you to submit papers focusing on what Adrienne Rich termed “the politics of location.” Papers may examine theoretical, literary, and, more broadly, artistic explorations of various kinds of location (for example, in addition to location, allocation, dislocation, relocation). How do cultural, economic, historical, and political legacies, as well as material conditions, inform or produce the movement of bodies across various spaces (for example, textual, media, geographical, temporal, embodied, relational)? How does such movement shape the definition, recognition, viability, and value of those bodies? How have changing conceptions of space produced and reshaped understandings of gender, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, race, disability, and class? Relatedly, in what ways does the body become the site where individual, local and global intersections take place?

Contributions may analyze works from any time period or engage with readings across times and cultures. Topics may include the following:

digital embodiments and cybersexualities

new media spaces as counter-geographies

the globalization of erotic spaces

race and class questioning within and against feminist and queer geography

postcolonial locations and bodies

decoloniality

feminist politics in local/global frameworks

transnational activism and body rights

human trafficking

migrations

refugee crises

Proposals (500 words) and a short/abbreviated curriculum vitae should be sent to Margaret Breen (Margaret.Breen@uconn.edu) and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou (katkit@enl.auth.gr) by March 15, 2017 (drafts will be due by August 1, 2017).

Gramma/Γράμμα: Journal of Theory and Criticism is an international journal, published in English and Greek once a year by the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in collaboration with the Publications Department of the university. It welcomes articles and book reviews from a wide range of areas within the theory and criticism of literature and culture. Of particular interest to the journal are articles with an interdisciplinary approach. Each individual issue has guest editors and is devoted to a subject of recent cultural interest, with book reviews relevant to the topic. All manuscripts are subject to blind peer review and will be commented on by at least two independent experts.

If you are interested in contributing to this themed issue, please send Professor Weinstock (Jacqueline.Weinstock@uvm.edu) an article title and an abstract of 200-250 words outlining what you would propose to cover by 1 June 2016. Final submissions should be no longer than 7,000 words, including the abstract, all notes and references.

If your abstract is accepted, the following deadlines apply:

Full papers by 15 November 2016

Revised final versions by 15 February 2017

Posted on March 24, 2016:

Call for Papers

Signs Special Issue: Displacement

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society invites submissions for a special issue titled “Displacement,” slated for publication in spring 2018.

The current refugee crisis gives new urgency to questions of gendered displacement. The United Nations’ most recent statistics place the number of registered Syrian refugees at 4.7 million, 50.7 percent of whom are women and over half of whom are children under eighteen. During the same period, tens of thousands of Central American women and children have crossed the Rio Grande into the United States. Feminists have already responded to concerns about sexual violence in refugee camps and during refugees’ journeys and to the gendered response to the crisis on the part of receiving states (i.e., demographic concerns surrounding gender ratios of migrants admitted). What are the larger questions of “displacement” that require an interdisciplinary and transnational feminist lens?

This special issue of Signs seeks submissions reflecting multifaceted, innovative, and interdisciplinary approaches to the question of displacement, as well as the potential for attention to displacement to address and transform central questions in feminist theory, including how feminists approach larger questions of space, place, and subjectivity. Feminist scholars have a long history of engagement with the question of displacement; across disciplines, feminist scholars have described, theorized, and critiqued gendered forms of displacement and how these displacements have shaped and reshaped geopolitics, national borders, political discourses, narrative form, and ethnic and racial formations both contemporarily and historically. Questions of place and belonging have long been at the heart of cultural work in literature, theater, visual culture, and the arts. We invite submissions on the theme of displacement widely conceived and at multiple scales—the subjective, the family, the city; regional, national, transnational, and global. Possible subjects include:

How humanitarian and state responses to displaced persons depend on, reinforce, or transform gendered, racial, and sexual norms.

Visual and narrative representations of displacement in relation to gendered and racialized subjectivities.

Cultural representations of displacement, migration, belonging, and exile. Critical and historical investigations and comparisons of feminist ideas of these subjects.

Reverberations of historical displacements in the contemporary world.

Claims to space and place as forms of resistance to displacement or as the basis for social movements (i.e., landless movements, right to the city).

Dispossession and displacement as central to neoliberalism, capitalist development, colonization, and slavery. How are dispossession and displacement related?

How experiences of displacement reshape constructions of “home” or the nation.

Critical assessments of homophobic and gender-based violence as sources of displacement.

Gendered figurations of internally and externally displaced persons as threats to national sovereignty or borders. The production of new forms of intimacy through displacement or the creation of new social movements through and in response to displacement.

The way that ethical norms and perspectives ignore or undervalue the importance of gender and gendered perspectives with regard to displacement.

Pieces that critically examine or call into question distinctions between migrants, refugees, and internally displaced persons are also welcome.

Signs particularly encourages transdisciplinary and transnational essays that address large questions, debates, and controversies without employing disciplinary or academic jargon. We welcome essays that make a forceful case for why displacement demands a specific and thoughtfully formulated interdisciplinary feminist analysis and why it demands our attention now. We seek essays that are forceful, passionate, strongly argued, and willing to take risks.

The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2016. Denise Horn, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Simmons College, and Serena Parekh, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University, will serve as guest editors of the issue.

Sprinkle, a peer-reviewed undergraduate Feminist and Queer Studies journal originally conceived in 2007 as a collection of student works from the McGill Sexual Diversity Studies course, seeks academic submissions for the Spring 2016 edition. Papers should be no more than 3000 words in length, in APA format, and show critical engagement with issues of gender and sexuality from all disciplines. We encourage submissions to explore the intersection of gender and sexuality with other social identities (race, class, dis/ability, etc.), however this is not required. We may also consider a small number of creative submissions (i.e. poetry, short stories, etc.).

Please send submissions via e-mail as .docx or .doc attachments to sprinkle.journal@gmail.comwith the subject heading: “Submission for Spring 2016 Issue.” In the email please include the following information: name as you would like it to appear in the journal; email address; institution of study, and a 100 word bio. Your essays should be ‘blinded’ meaning that they should contain no information that would identify the author. Papers must be submitted by March 18th.

Sprinkle looks forward to diverse and innovative submissions!

What is Sprinkle?

Now housed online through a partnership with The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy, the editors of the 2016 edition of Sprinkle are affiliated with California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, and seek to continue to produce a queer-positive, critical journal that works to challenge the normative experiences that are often privileged within our society. In this vein, we hope to draw attention to queer history and experience as well as other issues of gender and sexuality, subjects not often addressed within classroom curricula. This journal hopes to draw from and appeal to a wide audience, and people of numerous identities and backgrounds. Sprinkle aims to lend legitimacy to the thoughts and experiences of young people, and produce an engaging publication. For more info visit: http://freireproject.org/sprinkle

Posted on February 24, 2016:

The editorial team is reviewing submissions on a rolling basis until March 18th.

Sprinkle: An undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies, originally conceived in 2007 as a collection of student works from the McGill Introduction Sexual Diversity Studies course, seeks academic submissions for the spring 2016 edition. Papers should be no more than 3000 words in length and show critical engagement with issues of gender and sexuality from all disciplines. We encourage submissions to explore the intersection of gender and sexuality with other social identities (race, class, dis/ability, etc.), however this is not required. We may also consider a small number of creative submissions (i.e. poetry, short stories, etc.).

Please send submissions via e-mail as .docx, .doc, .pdf, or .rtf attachments to sprinkle.journal@gmail.com with the subject heading: “Submission for Volume 9.” In the email please include the following information: name as you would like it to appear in the journal; email address; institution of study, and a 100 word bio. Your essays should be ‘blinded’ meaning that they should contain no information that would identify the author. Papers will be reviewed on a rolling basis between Jan. – March. No papers submitted after March 18th will be considered without prior approval from the editorial board.

I am writing to invite you to join us for the 2016 Anna Julia Cooper lecture next week and to share the CFP for a national conference we are hosting at Wake Forest University on April 29.

Dr. Barbara Ransby will deliver the public lecture”From Black Power to Black LIves Matter: Mapping the Terrain of the Black Freedom Movement” on Tuesday, February 23 at 5:30 PM. Her lecture will be held at the Porter Byrum Welcome Center at Wake Forest University. There is parking available.

Dr. Ransby is an historian, writer, and longtime political activist. She is the author of a multi award-winning biography Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, and a political biography of Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson, entitled: Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. She is currently a Distinguished Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago in the Departments of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and History, where she also directs the campus-wide Social Justice Initiative at UIC.

On April 29, the Anna Julia Cooper Center will host the national conference “Know Her Truths: Advancing Justice for Women and Girls of Color.” The conference seeks scholars, students, community organizations, researchers, policy makers, foundations, and activists for an intensive series of discussions about the circumstances, challenges, and opportunities facing women and girls of color.

We invite proposals of 500-1000 words for facilitated conversations or interactive sessions. These proposals may identify an important conversation you propose to facilitate and the unique methods or tools you would use to lead that dialogue. Proposals may come from individuals or groups.

Proposals should reflect the interactive, working nature of the event focused on advancing equity for women and girls of color. As a working conference, it will be an event where attendees have active roles, where conference sessions include facilitated conversations and interactive sessions, and where attendees work to build partnerships and develop collaborative strategies.

Beyond Patriarchy in Muslim Societies: Gender and the Matrifocal Family to be published by I.B. Tauris
I am editing a book on matrifocal / female-centered forms of social life in the Muslim World. The book, which will be published by I.B. Tauris, aims at challenging the common perception that Islam and male dominated family regimes are inextricably intertwined. In the Muslim world there are and always have been forms of kinship and family organization of a kind that challenge the patriarchal paradigm. Such alternative modes of gender and power relations within the family may take (or took as if they take the form of matrifocality, uxori-/ matrilocality, matrilineality, and/or the lifestyle as a single parent.

The book will present case studies dealing with contemporary changes in family and gender relations brought about by globalization processes, such as the large scale work migration of men, or diaspora, war and violence as in the case of the contemporary refugee crisis. Particularly in the Middle East, where the “patriarchal family” was deemed to be the general pattern, such processes have given rise to fundamental social and demographic changes. Nowadays, many villages and town quarters are inhabited only by women, children, and the elderly, while the young and middle-aged men have emigrated or are imprisoned, exiled or involved in war. It is thus a timely question whether and to what extent “patriarchal” orders can be maintained in the continuing absence of men. In recent anthropological researches it has been observed that “women who are left alone” may be empowered by assuming gender roles and forms of authority and autonomy of a kind which formerly would have been considered impossible. Such transformations may be accompanied by the emergence of matrifocal family regimes which have not yet been properly discussed in the scientific literature. Moreover, the various ways in which such female-centered family constellations impact on the children and alter their prospective gender conceptualizations have not been addressed by contemporary research.

I would welcome papers dealing with such phenomena in North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The book also addresses historical cases indicating the presence of matrifocality in the context of marriage, family relations and gender orders situated in so-called Muslim “patriarchal” societies. A common feature of such alternative social formations, whether uxori-/matrilocal, matrilineal, and/or matrifocal, is that they may enhance female agency and power by limiting the role of husbands and fathers to that of “guests” in the households of their wives/mothers-in-law and children as happens in some regions of Southeast Asia or in the Gulf States). Men may have this kind of guest status in Islamized and initially matrilineal societies, or it may result from the activities of traveling traders, scholars and workers whose spouse(s) often lived alone for years on end, thereby giving rise to female centered family regimes. Other forms of matrifocally oriented family orders might be due to the peculiarities of specific Islamic institutions (as in the case of the Shi’i mut’a or Sunnimisyar-marriage) or may result from the individual decision of women to become a second or third wives and to meet the husband only on specific days of the week.

I invite authors to submit articles addressing such current or historical cases from the Muslim World.

If you are interested in contributing to this book, please send an abstract of your proposed contribution to Laila.Prager@uni-hamburg.deby March 15th, 2016. The abstract should be about 500 words long. The book will be finalized for publication at the end of 2016.

Know Her Truths: Advancing Justice for Women and Girls of Color Conference

April 29, 2016
Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC

The Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University invites proposals for a national conference focused on the lives of women and girls of color. The conference seeks scholars, students, community organizations, researchers, policy makers, foundations, and activists for an intensive series of discussions about the circumstances, challenges, and opportunities facing women and girls of color.

We invite proposals of 500-1000 words for facilitated conversations or interactive sessions. These proposals may identify an important conversation you propose to facilitate and the unique methods or tools you would use to lead that dialogue. Proposals may come from individuals or groups.

Proposals should reflect the interactive, working nature of the event focused on advancing equity for women and girls of color. As a working conference, it will be an event where attendees have active roles, where conference sessions include facilitated conversations and interactive sessions, and where attendees work to build partnerships and develop collaborative strategies.

This conference is part of an initiative to develop a meaningful research agenda on women and girls of color. Conversations will address what we know about the lives of women and girls of color, the deficits in our knowledge, and the meaningful ways in which increased knowledge about the lives of women and girls of color can influence our policy and political landscape. What should a national research agenda for women and girls of color include? How do we include multi-sector partners? How do we establish models of accountable, community-based research? How do communities, policy makers, foundations, and other representatives access research to make change?

We define women and girls of color broadly and invite proposals that reflect meaningful diversity with attention to race, ethnicity, gender expression, sexuality, region, class, and other salient identity points.

Our call is open to many subjects and issue areas. Possible themes include:

Economic equity, justice, and security, including defining security and prosperity for women and girls of color and understanding unique systems of employment, wealth, and caregiving

Health equity, access, and justice, including health disparities, effects of public policy choices, and connections between mental, emotional, physiological, and reproductive health

Educational achievement and advancement, including education disparities, experiences in schools, and the impact of education

Leadership and identity, including representation in elected political leadership, organizing, activism, business, entrepreneurship, and innovation

Voices and images in popular culture in media, including connections between mass media consumption and life outcomes, how women and girls of color produce media and culture, and critical media literacy

Research practices, particularly promising practices in community-based research

Translation of research into public spaces, including to policy makers, community organizations, or foundations

All submissions must include the submitter(s) name; title of proposed session or conversation; 500-1000 word description of the session or conversation; university or organization affiliation; and contact information.

Proposals should be sent via email to ajc@wfu.edu. All proposals must be received by 5:00 pm CST on Tuesday, March 1. If accepted to participate, individuals must provide their own travel and lodging.

Topics may include (but are not limited to): Wives, care, unpaid labour, and parenting; histories of wife work; wives and motherhood; wives and sexuality; wives, fidelity and infidelity; wives and race; wives and violence; abuse of wives; representations of the wife in popular culture; wives and sex work; wives, monogamy, polygamy, polyamory, and alternatives; wives and the law; wives and wealth; wives and poverty; religion and wives; wives and regulation; governing wives; immigration and wives; LGBT wives; wives and same sex marriage; wives, brides and weddings; divorce and wives; wife identities; wives and patriarchy; wives and feminism; “Stepford Wives”; Post-second Wave feminism and being a wife (or not); wives, husbands, and gender performativity; wives and work

Overview: This volume will be a space for critical discussion, and production of new imaginaries within, feminist scholarship, analysis and feminist politics, about what is and has been meant by, involved in, required of, and what it means to be, a “wife.” This volume seeks to bring together diverse critical perspectives through creative contributions, social science research, scholarly works, and critical theorizing about roles, representations, identities, and work associated with being a “wife” and doing (or refusing to do) the work associated with wives. This is an interdisciplinary anthology. Contributions are encouraged from a wide range of disciplines and fields, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, women’s and gender studies, cultural studies, literary studies, legal studies, and all social science and humanities. Creative contributions are also encouraged. Fiction, poetry and art will also be welcome in the anthology alongside academic writing.

Submission Guidelines: Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words together with a short bio to both Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, Boston University, College of General Studies: lhallst@bu.edu and Rebecca Bromwich, Carleton University, Department of Law and Legal Studies: Rebecca.Bromwich@carleton.ca by August 1, 2016.

Completed manuscripts of 6,000-12,000 words (completed chapters should be15-20 double spaced pages, including all references and endnotes) will be due by May 1, 2017. Contributors will be responsible for ensuring that manuscripts adhere to MLA style.

The Critical Theory Certificate Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in conjunction with The Center for the Humanities presents the fifth annual interdisciplinary conference on

Critical Theory to be held May 5th-6th, 2015. This year’s conference will be devoted to the theory and practice of translation.

Literally meaning “carried across,” translation facilitates the movement of ideas among individuals, cultures languages, time periods, and geographic boundaries. Since antiquity, scholars have questioned translation’s ability to preserve meaning across languages and debated whether the successful translator should provide a word for word conversion of the original or adapt the source material to fit its new context and, in so doing, take on an authorial role. The globalization of the present era has highlighted how translation fosters communication while emphasizing cultural differences and disparities, simultaneously illuminating and distorting meaning. In the liminal space between the spoken and the unspeakable, translation serves as an adaptive tool that facilitates the development of new social memories and historical narratives. This conference seeks to employ Critical Theory to examine all aspects of translation—its history, evolution, practice, and effects on language, identity, culture, and society—in order to interrogate the functions of and standards for a successful translation. We welcome a wide range of disciplines and theoretical approaches, including literary theory, psychoanalysis, identity theory, semiotics, philosophy, social theory, cultural studies, postcolonialism, gender studies, and political theory. Some of the topics that this conference seeks to address include, but are not limited to:

Translation’s adaptation of the source material to fit new historical, social, and cultural contexts

The creative aspects of a translation, and its capacity to stand on its own artistic merits

The translator’s role as an author and translation’s fidelity (or lack thereof) to the original source material

The possibility of cultural translation

The relationship between translation and globalization

Translation as means of comprehending Self and Other

The particular characteristics of writers and translators in exile, immigrant, diaspora, and dissident communities

The evolution and history of translation, especially with respect to Antiquity and the Middle Ages

The psychological effects of translation, particularly with regard to identity politics

Translation and its relationships with etymology and philology (e.g. Turǧumān, dragoman, drogman,

targum)

Translation as an ideological or political tool

Translation and memory

The function of translation in polyglot communities

Theoretical analyses of translations

Authors who translate and the inner translator in bilingual and trilingual authors

Technology’s effect on translation and the impact of internet translation communities

Translation as figure

Translation, imitation, and hybridity

The consequences of improper or mistranslation

Please submit a 300-word abstract to translationtheorytoday@gmail.com by March 1st. Proposals should include the title of the paper, the presenter’s name, a 50-word bio including institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests. We also welcome panel proposals of three to four papers.

NWSA is pleased to announce the first of two plenary sessions for the NWSA 2016 conference, Decoloniality.

Decolonizing InstitutionsFriday November 11, 2016

Julia Chinyere Oparah is an activist scholar, social justice educator, experienced community organizer and mindful leader, who is dedicated to producing critical scholarship in the service of progressive social movements. Oparah is an African diaspora specialist, whose interests span a number of different social concerns, including activism by women of color, violence against women, women and the prison-industrial complex, restorative justice, queer and transgender liberation, race and adoption, research justice and birth activism. Her work is informed by personal experiences of crossing racial, gendered and national boundaries as a biracial, transracial/ transnational adoptee, survivor of intimate violence and queer parent with ties to Britain, Nigeria and the U.S. Oparah is Associate Provost, and professor and department co-chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She played a leading role in the establishment of Mills’ Queer Studies Program and also led the College’s Gender Expression and Identity initiative, leading Mills College to become the first women’s college to adopt an admissions policy that is welcoming to transgender and gender-questioning students. More recently, she has co-created a program in Public Health and Health Equity at the College in partnership with local minority-serving hospitals.

Audra Simpson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014), winner of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize, the Laura Romero Prize from the American Studies Association as well as the Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society (2015). She is co-editor of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). She has articles in Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems and Wicazo Sa Review. In 2010 she won Columbia University’s School for General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.” She is a Kahnawake Mohawk.

Kim TallBear, author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013), is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She studies the racial politics of “gene talk” in science and popular culture. She is also interested in the similarities between Western constructions of “nature” and “sexuality,” and how they can be understood differently in indigenous worldviews. She draws on indigenous, feminist, and queer theory in her teaching and research that focus on undermining the nature/culture split and its role in colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and environmental degradation. TallBear blogs at Indigeneity & Technoscience, www.kimtallbear.com. She is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, and is also descended from the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

PROPOSAL DEADLINEThe deadline to submit a proposal to the 2016 conference, Decoloniality, is Monday February 22, 2016. Only online submissions will be accepted. Please read thefull CFPfor complete instructions for submission.

Posted on January 27, 2016

38th ANNUAL RUTGERS SUSMAN GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE

This year’s theme is “Confronting the Violence(s) of History: Critical Methods, Epistemologies, and Engagements.” Please see the attached CFP.

The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), in partnership with the International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI), will be hosting a conference in Wilmington, North Carolina, on 12-14 May 2016. The theme of the conference is “The New Global City: Presenting and Translating Cultures within a World-Wide Citizenry.” We are pleased to welcome scholars from a wide range of disciplines to this international conference. David Gilmartin, Christine Fair, Abdulaziz Sachedina, Saskia Sassen are our keynote speakers.

David Gilmartin, Professor of History at North Carolina State University, is an internationally lauded scholar of modern South Asian history. Gilmartin’s most recent book is Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (U of CA Press, 2015).

Christine Fair, Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, is widely published and consulted on militancy and security in Pakistan. Her most recent book is Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (OUP, 2014).

Abdulaziz Sachedina, Professor and International Institute of Islamic Thought Chair in Islamic Studies at George Mason University, is an esteemed scholar of Islamic law, interfaith relations, and human rights and ethics in Islamic contexts. His most recent book is Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (OUP, 2014).

Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, is widely published on globalization and transnational human migration. Her most recent book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Belknap Press, 2014).

Please see: CFP UNCW Conference for information on submitting to the conference and for details about the conference itself. You can also find out more information about the conference at uncw.edu/pakistangrant/. More information about UNCW-IIUI partnership is forthcoming. We welcome participation from graduate students and other scholars. Our aim is to feature broad array of disciplines and perspectives at the conference. Please feel free to apply for a symposium, panel, paper, or poster presentation.

Abstracts will be due 8 February2016 and will be evaluated expeditiously by a peer review committee already established for this purpose. Registration for the conference will open in February. Information about local hotels, areas of interest, and the conference venue can be obtained on the website or by emailing iiui-uncw@uncw.edu.

“The Global City” is the first of two international conferences to be hosted by the IIUI-UNCW University Partnership, a 3-year long cooperative agreement sponsored by the US Department of State that links humanists and social scientists at both institutions. UNCW is North Carolina’s premier Southeastern public university, with a strong emphasis on community engagement, global citizenship and cutting edge scholarship and teaching.

Please join us for what will be a lively and informing two and a half days,

Sincerely,

The IIUI-UNCW Conference Planning Committee

Posted on January 12, 2016:

NATIONAL WOMEN’S STUDIES ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE

Proposal Submission Deadline – February 22, 2016
The online submission system will open in early January. Please note: All submitters and presenters must have a valid NWSA log in and password to submit. See the FAQ for more details.

Decoloniality is a worldview that denaturalizes settler colonial logics and structuring violences. Coloniality and settler governance­ are transnational in scope and include territorial occupation, conquest, removal, economic exploitation, resource extraction, displacement, and dehumanization. Settler colonialism is also a way of knowing that permeates institutions, including education, the law, science, economics, politics, and religion. Decoloniality disrupts and departs from settler logics, structures, myths, stories, archives, institutions, affects, embodiments, aesthetics, desires, ontologies, categories, cartographies, and politics. It has a long, diverse genealogy and can be understood as an ongoing process of co-resistance and alliance. As an approach to thought and action, decolonial work exposes how coloniaility is not “past”: simultaneously, it traces forms of critical and creative resistance and shows possibilities for (and the necessity of) decolonial being/knowing/loving/resisting/creating (L. Simpson 2015).

NWSA invites all of those interested to submit proposals for panels, papers, workshops, and performances that represent the wide range of intersectional and transnational scholarship in the US and beyond.

Subthemes

Borders and Be/longings

Movements and Migrations

Unsettling Settler Logics

Bodies and Biopolitics

World-making and Resistant Imaginaries

Please note: All submitted proposals must address one of the five themes listed. All submitters and proposed presenters must have a log in with NWSA in order to submit a proposal. Please review the FAQ for more information.

Full details of the CFP and submissions instructions are now posted on the www.nwsa.org . The online submission system will open in January.

Posted on January 4, 2016:

Posted on December 4, 2015:

“Bodies in Negotiation: rethinking dangers and pleasures in the 21st century”

THEME: “Bodies in Negotiation: rethinking dangers and pleasures in the 21st century”

DEADLINE for submitting proposals: December 1, 2015

The Central Pennsylvania Consortium (CPC), comprised of Dickinson, Franklin & Marshall, and Gettysburg Colleges, announces its Annual Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Conference and solicits proposals for the conference on April 2, 2016 at Gettysburg College.

The theme of this conference is “Bodies in Negotiation: rethinking dangers and pleasures in the 21st century. The scope of this conference is to investigate the many ways systems of criminal justice, migration, sex work, care work, ability, renegotiate feminist understandings of the interplay between Dangers and Pleasures. This year’s conference calls for papers, panels, and creative work that address the interaction between danger and pleasure through topics that include but are not limited to “incarceration and carceral protectionism/humanitarianism”; “sex work, trafficking, and migration”; “Gender identity, gender non-conformity, and gender violence”; “sexuality, race, and gender.” We seek papers and proposals from across the disciplines and inter-disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, critical race studies, literary studies, American studies, transnational/global studies, film studies, and of course women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Denise E. Brennan, associate professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology, Georgetown University

Please send a one page (250-word) proposal by Tuesday, December 1 to Kathy Missildine, Executive Assistant to the CPC (kathy.missildine@fandm.edu).
Faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students are encouraged to apply.

At the top of your proposal, include the following contact information:
1) Full name of presenter(s); if a panel, include all panelists’ names
2) Institution or place of study or employment
3) Position (student/undergraduate or graduate, faculty, etc.)
4) Email address
5) Mailing address

English Graduate Student Association, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Contact Email:

uncg.egsa.2016@gmail.com

Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference: (Un)Stable Identities: How the Self is Forged and Found

“There will be time / to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”­ Eliot, Prufrock

“We know what we are, but now what we may be.”­ Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I am not an angel…and I will not be one till I die. I will be myself.” ­ Bronte, Jane Eyre

For the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s eighth annual interdisciplinary graduate student conference, to be held on March 19, 2016, we invite proposals for 20­minute discussions on the theme of identity. Please share your 200­word paper or poster proposals with us at uncg.egsa.2016@gmail.com by the December 31 deadline.

This conference will explore the ways identity is forged, fragmented, and flexible. We welcome papers from all areas as well as papers with an interdisciplinary focus. Areas may include literature, rhetoric and composition, creative writing, history, art, psychology, sociology, religious studies, linguistics, digital media, and others. Papers can broadly explore identity in all its forms and complexities.

Possible paper and poster topics may include but are certainly not limited to:

Fragmented identity

Identity and time

Identity and memory

Cultural identity

Spiritual identity

Identity and place

Intersections of different identities

Identity and/or culture

Identity, culture, and media

Identity and gender

Identity and the body

Identity and youth/children

Identity in the classroom

We invite abstracts for consideration at the address above. In your email submission, please include the presenter’s name, institution of affiliation, email address, phone number, type of presentation (paper or poster), and any audio­visual requirements. Please do not include any identifying information on the abstract itself.

Panel proposals can also be submitted to the same email address by December 31 and should include the following: panel title, organizer/moderator’s name and contact information, names and contact information for panelists, a short description of the panel topic, and abstracts of the papers included in the panel.

Poster presentations will be considered. We will have a small foyer devoted to this type of presentation. We will be able to accommodate poster presentations from students who cannot physically come to the conference. Please note the presenter must print out the poster and physically mail it to us if they cannot be present at the conference. However, all paper presenters must be present, as we will be unable to include presentations via telecommunications.

The registration fee for presenters is $25.

Posted on November 18, 2015:

Special Issue “Contested Terrains: Women of Color and Third World Women, Feminisms, and Geopolitics”

Hypatia seeks papers for a special issue on “Contested Terrains” featuring feminist scholarship that explores the varied geopolitical landscapes on which contestations about feminist theories and practices regarding women of color and Third World women are situated. The experiences and perspectives of women of color and Third World women have been frequently erased, distorted and manipulated both by dominant feminist discourses and by dominant geopolitical discourses. Long after the proclaimed demise of second wave feminism in the academy, neoliberal feminist discourses continue to dominate within neocolonial geopolitical regimes. Conventional geopolitical discourses flatten the complexity of the lives of women of color and Third World women and ignore their diversely embodied, material and psychic realities by emphasizing conflicts and alliances between nation-states. We invite feminist analyses that rescale geopolitical landscapes, shifting our attention from the macroscopic perspectives of international affairs and globalization to the smaller scale connections between space and politics that play out at the level of intimate lives, community practices, and everyday tactics of survival and resistance of women of color and Third World women. Papers that explore the ways in which race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, disability, age and other forms of difference intersect with issues of geopolitical location are encouraged.

This special issue starts from the premise that differences and disagreements among women have value. Thus, we encourage submissions that explore tensions among women—locally, regionally, nationally and globally—as a potential source of productive feminist questioning, reflection, knowledge and practice. At the same time, such tensions should not be romanticized; disagreements are experienced differently and disproportionately by diverse participants with varying issues at stake. Because the material and psychic consequences of disagreement are rarely distributed evenly across geopolitical terrains, contributors are encouraged to analyze the consequences—as well as the origins—of contestations between and among women of color and white women and/or Third World and First World women.

Identifiers “women of color” and “Third World women” are used here to center the perspectives of women of color who—whether living in the Third World or in the First World—contest the neocolonialism and cultural imperialism of the First World, including First World feminisms. However, contributions critically examining the identifiers “women of color” or “Third World women” themselves, as well as geopolitical divisions of the globe into “First” and “Third” worlds (or other conventional geopolitical mappings) are welcome. How best to describe the differing geopolitical contexts of different feminisms in the era of economic, political, and cultural globalization is—and should be—itself a site of contestation.

Possible topics may include:

Contested discursive terrains: For example, the contested geopolitical partitionings of West/East; North/South; or First World/Third World and competing feminist understandings of globalization as embedded in theories of “women of color feminism,” “Third World feminism,” “transnational feminism,” “postcolonial feminism,” and “global feminism.”

Contested epistemological terrains: For example, inequitable access to publishing resources, the privileging of written over oral traditions, and different understandings of cultural intelligibility.

Contested political terrains: For example, the geopolitics of war, military occupations, nationalism, patriotism, terrorism, migration, border patrols, detention, and deportation; differing experiences of trauma and violence, security and danger.

Contested economic terrains: For example, resource conflicts between and among women (and girls) situated differently as owners, sellers, consumers, workers and commodities in various industries ranging from agriculture to technology to tourism.

Contested terrains of kinship: For example, local and global disagreements among women concerning the ethics of polygamy, arranged marriages, transnational adoptions, and other familial forms.

Contested terrains of solidarity: For example, the struggles that arise among women, locally and globally, with different ethico-political values or priorities; how allies often harm those they intend to help.

Submission deadline:December 1, 2015

Papers should be no more than 8000 words, inclusive of notes and bibliography, prepared for anonymous review, and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 200 words. In addition to articles, we invite submissions for our Musings section. These should not exceed 3,000 words, including footnotes and references. All submissions will be subject to external review. For details please see Hypatia’s submission guidelines.

Posted on November 16, 2015:
Department of Comparative Literature, Indiana University Bloomington

Graduate Conference

April 1-2, 2016

Crystal Queer

Clarity and understanding, sight and knowledge, are so intimately linked in contemporary discourse that we rarely find ourselves interrogating why this connection is made, how this invisible link works to produce crucial notions of what knowledge is, and who comes to know it.

We welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines across the humanities including, but not limited to: Literary Studies, Translation Studies, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Disability Studies, Cultural Studies, History and Historiography, Philosophy, Critical Race Studies, and Critical Ethnic Studies.

Please send an abstract (300 words max), a title for the presentation (20 minutes max), and a short bio (50 words max) including your name, email address, degree level and institutional affiliation to: complit.iu@gmail.com (both in the body of the email and as an attachment) by January 30, 2016.

Posted on November 16, 2015:

The Associated Colleges of the South and Southwestern University are pleased to announce the eighth annual Gender Studies Conference at Southwestern University, February 19-21, 2016. The theme will be: “Gender Across…”.

This interdisciplinary conference welcomes work that explores how gender and sex are represented across the disciplines of the humanities, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the fine arts, as well as across race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, disability, space, place, time, bodies, culture, and genres.

Faculty, students, and staff from any college or university are invited to submit proposals for scholarly and creative presentations, including individual papers, panels, creative performances, artworks, poster exhibits and electronic presentations. Scholarly presentations and artistic performances should last approximately 15 minutes.

Abstracts should include a title and 250 word summary of the project. Submissions are due no later than Friday, November 20th and should be sent electronically to ACSgender2016@gmail.com. Please send any questions to the same email address.

The Honors Symposium offers outstanding undergraduates the opportunity to participate in an academic conference with concurrent sessions. In 2015 the Symposium featured 64 student paper presentations, and we look forward to an equal number of exceptional presentations this year. Presentations are followed by a keynote speaker.

We welcome submissions from any UNCG undergraduate student. Papers can be written in any discipline, but presentations should be geared toward a general audience. Students may submit a paper that has been completed for a course or write a paper for the Symposium.

Students can submit a paper by:

Submit your paper for consideration electronically to Dr. Angela Bolte at akbolte@uncg.edu byFriday, December 18, at 5:00 p.m. Students should plan for a ten-minute summary presentation and Q&A to follow.

The Honors Symposium Prizes, sponsored by UNCG’s Lloyd International Honors College, are awarded for outstanding papers submitted to the Symposium. This year prizes, dedicated to the encouragement of high quality academic writing at UNCG, will include monetary awards of $250, $150, and $100 in two categories for UNCG students: Arts & Humanities, and Sciences & Professional Schools. Award decisions are based on the papers submitted, not the presentation of the papers. Papers must be presented at the Symposium to be eligible for a prize.

For more information about the Symposium, students and faculty may contact Dr. Angela Bolte in Lloyd International Honors College at (336) 334-4734 or akbolte@uncg.edu.

Posted on November 6, 2015:

globalstatusofwomen-conf.org

The feminization of poverty

Wage inequality

Women in the workplace

Child marriage

War and women

Human trafficking

Environmental change and the economic status of women

Religion and the status of women

Girls and education

Sexual assault/rape

Disability and accessibility

Relational aggression between girls and women

Mental health and women

Artistic, mediated and literary representations/performances

Socialmedia and social change for women and girls

Gender identity and socialization

Social policy and the state of women and girls

Environmental health risks to women

Effects of global climate change on women

All submissions will be peer reviewed, and those accepted will be notified no later than January 1, 2016.

Finished papers will ideally be 15-20 minutes in length.
Please contact Lori Underwood (ahconf@cnu.edu) with any questions about the conference.

Posted on October 28, 2015:

Call for Abstracts

Bridging through Stories: Families, Work, and Gendered Migration across the Global Village

2016 Symposium

Friday, March 25, 2016 | LBJ Student Center | 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

The Women and Gender Research Collaborative at Texas State University is soliciting abstracts from scholars who would like to participate in our upcoming symposium, Bridging through Stories: Families, Work, and Gendered Migration across the Global Village. This event will provide a forum for diverse perspectives on issues of families, work and the gendered nature of migration across the globe. The symposium will take place on March 25, 2016, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the LBJ Student Center on the Texas State University campus in San Marcos, Texas.

Scholars from Texas, the United States, and the world are invited to engage in discussing various issues related to the conference theme. Please indicate whether you are interested in making a paper presentation, organizing a discussion panel or submitting an undergraduate poster presentation. Persons interested in participating should submit by November 23, 2015, the following: an abstract of no more than 250 words and a one-page curriculum vitae. These may be sent as attachments to cdgs@txstate.edu or mailed to the address below. Questions regarding the symposium theme and abstracts may be directed to cdgs@txstate.edu.

Student participation is encouraged. Limited travel grants, based on demonstrated need, are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

After the symposium, presenters are invited to submit their papers to the Journal of Research on Women and Gender, a peer reviewed, open access online journal hosted by the Texas Digital Library. For submission guidelines, or to register to be an author or reviewer, go to:

School of Social and Political Sciences (ISCSP)
University of Lisbon, 25-27th may 2016

Gender and women studies and feminisms have produced important transformations in our daily life and in our understanding of reality. While the topic of equality of rights is increasingly on the public agenda, there have been advances and retreats and persisting gender inequalities continue to challenge us to look for more solid analyses.

The Interdisciplinary Centre on Gender Studies (CIEG) wishes to contribute to the analytical deepening of these issues and invites you to participate in the International Congress of Gender Studies, on 25, 26 and 27th may 2016 under the following theme “Gender Studies in Debate: Pathways, challenges and interdisciplinary perspectives”

We count on you to address questions such as: what impact have had different gender equality policies on the effective implementation of rights? How to ensure the implementation of laws and prevent perverse effects? Power, relations of power, masculine domination and gender: which connections? Are there frontiers between activism and research, and if yes, how/where to draw them? How to balance the collective subject ‘women’ with ethnic, class, generational, sexual orientation, and global diversity? How is gender performed in daily life and in different institutions: between reproduction and agency? Heteronormativity, bodies, and sexuality: central issue for gender studies? Men and masculinities: new configurations? What backlash effects have the crisis, the increased inequalities and the neoliberal thinking had on the current life of men and women?

We also wish to bring to the debate the contributions of researchers from different parts of the world to help us reflect upon the pathways followed by gender and women studies and feminisms in their geographic, political and sociocultural contexts.

Marking its 4th anniversary, CIEG is very pleased to join the celebrations of the 110 years of Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas (ISCSP) of University of Lisbon (ULisboa), by organizing its 1st International Congress.
The abstracts, no longer than 300 words, should clearly indicate in which research line (I, II or III) the paper should be included. The research lines to consider are the following:

I

Gender, feminisms and women studies

History of ideas and theories;

Contemporary theories and innovations;

Extensive and intensive methodologies and international comparative perspective.

Feminist Spaces is now accepting student submissions for its third issue and invites undergraduate and graduate students to submit academic papers, creative writings, and artistic pieces that adhere to this issue’s theme of feminist LGBTQ+ intersectionality.

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling regarding same-sex marriage equality and the media’s growing interest in transgender men and women has re-initiated discussions of feminist intersectionality with regard to the LGBTQ+ movement. We especially welcome papers that discuss the experiences of racial minorities within the topic. We also welcome papers that discuss F-to-M inclusivity in feminism.

As the undergraduate research community works to ensure that those in the U.S. Congress have a clear understanding of the research and education programs they fund, nothing more effectively demonstrates the value of undergraduate research than a student participant’s words, work, and stories. Undergraduate research must be among the programs that members of Congress understand if it is to continue to be supported, and to grow.

Students and their faculty mentors are invited to apply for the Council on Undergraduate Research’s (CUR) 20th annual undergraduate poster session on Capitol Hill. In addition to other events, there will be an evening poster session and reception where students will have the opportunity to speak directly to members of Congress and demonstrate how they have been impacted by these programs.

Please visit the website for more information about the submission process and Posters on the Hill program. Questions? Please contact Mary Pat Twomey, Manager for Student Programs, at mptwomey@cur.org.

Posted on September 3, 2015:

Carolyn and Norwood Thomas Undergraduate Research and Creativity Expo

As you know, the URSCO hosts an annual celebration of student scholarship. Presentation formats include Posters,Oral,Scholarly Performance/Film, Music or Video Productions, andExhibit/Display. We hope to see representation of scholarship from every department on campus!

We will begin accepting abstracts on January 26.

Period for abstract submission ends on February 16.

ALL UNCG undergraduates engaged in faculty-mentored inquiry are encouraged to participate.

The State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium (SNCURCS) is accepting abstracts for student participation in the November 14 conference. The 11th Annual SNCURCS will be held on the campus of High Point University. The deadline for abstract submission is October 16. Let’s send a great showing of our student scholars to HPU.

Note: the URSCO will pay registration fees and provide travel assistance for any UNCG student participating. Contact us for additional information.

Posted on September 3, 2015:

URCA Spring 2016 – accepting proposals through Oct 4

We are accepting requests for support through the general URCA (Undergraduate Research and Creativity Award) and Globally Engaged URCA fund lines for Spring 2016. GE URCA proposals may include requests for Spring – Summer terms. Don’t miss this October 4 deadline. (Full Summer requests are due Feb 14.)

Undergraduate and graduate students are invited to submit abstracts and panel proposals to the inaugural meeting of Feminism Here and Now, an interdisciplinary conference organized by PhD students in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As the US continues to grapple with changes regarding gender, race, class, and sexuality in an increasingly global environment, Feminism Here and Now seeks to encourage critical conversation among faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students about the contemporary and future states of feminist theory, pedagogy, and praxis. Both inside and outside of the academy, feminism remains a contested term that raises many unresolved questions. What are the relationships among feminist studies, critical race studies, black feminist studies, sexuality studies, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory? What is the proper object of inquiry for feminist projects (women? genders? non-humans?)? Is feminist theory transnational? How might feminism continue to critique and intervene in a broad spectrum of cultural, political, and social issues in the first half of the 21st century?

Instead of definitively answering these and other questions, this conference will provide an opportunity for conversations among feminist students and scholars from diverse academic disciplines. We invite abstracts on feminism here and now with an understanding that writers may consider each of these terms in their broadest contexts, where feminism may refer to a multiplicity of political and theoretical positions; here may designate any place or space; andnow can include all relevant pasts, presents, and futures. Potential areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to: defining feminisms, feminist histories and futures, sexuality studies, queer theory, LGBTQ studies, new media, and the future of feminist activism.

Instructions for individual paper and panel submissions can be found on the Feminism Here and Now website at fhnconference.com. The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2015.Participants will be notified of acceptance by October 1.

Posted on August 24, 2015:

The call for papers for The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ 17th Conference is now available online! The theme for the 2017 conference is: Difficult Conversations: Thinking and Talking about Women, Genders, and Sexualities Inside and Outside the Academy. It will take place at Hofstra University, Hempstead NY from June 1-4, 2017.

Many people have been victims of rape, but we are all victims of what has been called a “rape culture.” This topic deserves more attention towards education and prevention, and not just on the college campus. Rape culture is an idea that links rape and sexual violence to the culture of a society, and in which commonly-held beliefs, attitudes and practices normalize, excuse, tolerate, and even condone rape. This edited collection examines rape culture in the context of the current programming–attitudes, education, and awareness. We invite submissions that explore changing the programming in terms of educational processes, practices and experiences associated with rape culture across diverse cultural, historical, and geographic locations. Accepted papers will explore the complexity of rape culture from a variety of contexts and perspectives. We welcome interdisciplinary academic submissions from educators and students, as well as experiential accounts from members of various community settings doing work aimed at making a positive difference.

Questions for Engagement and Possible Topics for Consideration: Kurt Cobain once said: “Rape is one of the most terrible crimes on earth and it happens every few minutes. The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women about how to defend themselves. What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape. Go to the source and start there.” Is this easier said than done? Why? What are some challenges faced in changing the programming? What do we teach our sons and daughters about rape culture and how do we teach them? Do we need to talk with children—both boys and girls—from an early age about stereotypes and focus on the strengths both boys and girls have? Do we need more stories and movies that feature strong and realistic female characters who do not need to be rescued by boys or men and who may even save the day for everyone, without sacrificing themselves in the process? Role models? What do they currently see and hear on a daily basis through literature, media, social settings, surroundings, etc.? What do they experience? What about catcalling and street harassment? How do these factor into rape culture? What are some steps that could be taken towards appropriate education and prevention? For specific ways to change or augment current cultural and academic education that could make a difference, educators and learners might first want to start thinking about their own programming. What are their thoughts on the topic of rape and how have their thoughts been formed over the years? What happens when victims speak out? Safe spaces need to be formed for people to be able to speak up and break the pained and fearful silence. We are open to your thoughts.

Submission Guidelines: Abstracts/Proposal (300-500 words) with a 50-word biography due: August 31, 2015. Acceptance will be made by: October 31, 2015. Completed manuscripts (18-25 pages double-spaced with references in MLA format) are due: April 30, 2016. Please note that acceptance will depend on the strength and fit of the final piece. Please send inquiries and abstracts to editors: Geraldine Cannon Becker and Angel Dionne: rapeculturechanging@gmail.com

Posted January 22, 2015 (ongoing): WGFC Seeks Submissions

Women, Gender, and Families of Color (WGFC) invites submissions for upcoming issues. WGFC is a new multidisciplinary journal that centers the study of Black, Latina/o, Indigenous, and Asian American women, gender, and families. Within this framework, the journal encourages theoretical and empirical research from history, the social and behavioral sciences, and humanities including comparative and transnational research, and analyses of domestic social, cultural, political, and economic policies and practices. The journal has a rolling submission policy and welcomes manuscripts, proposals for guest-edited special issues, and book reviews at any time. Manuscripts accepted for review receive an editorial decision within an average of 45-60 days. For submission guidelines, please visit: www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/wgfc/wgfcsubmissions.html.